Custom Essays Online-Financial Statement Analysis Paper Individual Assignment
One basic method that an accountant can use to analyze the financial situation of a business is ratio analysis. This can be a useful tool no matter the type of legal structure of the business and regardless of whether or not ownership is public or private. To help assure the availability of the necessary data, though, this assignment will be focused solely on a publicly-traded company.
As an overview, you will choose a publicly traded company from a list provided at the end of this assignment. Locate the company’s website, retrieve the latest company’s annual report from that site, calculate specific ratios for the latest two fiscal years, and respond to a limited number of analysis questions.
Please note that this entails far more than finding pre-calculated ratios from a website such as Yahoo! Finance or Google Finance. If you desire, you can use such a site for a reasonableness check on the results of your calculations, but any such comparisons should not be part of your resulting paper. Also, you might not match exactly to their figures anyway since those may include quarterly updates.
The paper should be three-to-four double-spaced pages (not counting the cover page and bibliography) in Word doc using a standard font (11 or 12 point) and appropriate margins (e.g., no more than one-inch). APA formatting should be followed. The paper should include a section for the ratio calculations and a section to respond to questions. You should also include a cover page and a bibliography.